Night School, Page 4

  in public.

  Safe enough.

  Which was crazy.

  But also logical. In for a penny, in for a pound. All or nothing. He was committed. He had wondered how it would feel. It turned out to feel like falling. Like skydiving, maybe. The long, long free fall before the parachute opens. Falling, and falling. He couldn’t fight it. All he could do was take a breath and relax and surrender.

  He had left the hotel unseen, through the parking garage. No reason, except a shortcut to another bar he knew. She was driving in, ready to start work. Late evening, high end, high rollers. A different world. Except not anymore. He could have anything he wanted. Asking was part of the fun. Right there in the garage. Suppose he was wrong? But he wasn’t. He had seen her before. She smiled and named a very high figure. He would have paid ten times more, just because of the way she was standing. And she was fresh out of the shower. Not a virgin, but as close as it got, on a day to day basis.

  She drove, back to the place she had only just left.

  Were there security cameras in the parking garage?

  He thought not. He was the kind of guy who dealt in details. He was observant. He noticed everything. He had to. Part of his job. On the garage ceiling he had seen fireproof foam, and electrical conduits, and five-inch drains, and a sprinkler system.

  No cameras.

  Safe enough.

  Which was crazy.

  But also logical.

  He rehearsed it in his mind, and then did it fast. At first she thought it was role play. Like he was acting out what he saw on VHS. He threw her on her front and straddled her, pinning her elbows under his knees, his butt on hers, crouched like a jockey on a horse, and she moaned like they all do, and he leaned down and strangled her from behind, fast and hard, shutting it all down double quick. She tried to buck and heave, but she could barely move. Only her feet, really, trying to get him in the back with her heels, but not quite making it, so they thrashed up and down uselessly, like swimming. And then they stopped, and he hung on tight until he was sure, and then he hung on some more, and then he let her go and got the hell out.

  All or nothing.

  Chapter 5

  Reacher slept well in his executive bedroom, but woke early, and was already out and about when at seven o’clock a catering truck delivered industrial-size reservoirs of coffee, and a tray of breakfast pastries about the size of an on-deck circle. Much more than three people could eat. Which meant the staff was on its way.

  It arrived at seven-thirty in the shape of two mid-grade executive officers from the National Security Council. Personally known by Sinclair, she said on an introductory call, and trusted by her, presumably. They were both men, both in their thirties, both dour, as if worn down by the data they handled. By eight o’clock they were up and running, with secure phone lines established, and Reacher got in ahead of Waterman and White with his staffing request, and by nine Neagley was in the house, early enough to be already ordering up storms of information through the NSC before Waterman’s help even got there, who was then followed twenty minutes later by White’s. Both new arrivals were men. They looked like younger versions of their bosses. Waterman’s guy was called Landry, and White’s was called Vanderbilt, no relation to the rich guy from history.

  They hauled furniture from place to place, and set up a three-way joint control center in the classroom, run by Neagley and Landry and Vanderbilt. The NSC babysitters were kept in the office, and Reacher and Waterman and White took conference calls at the table, in the leather chairs. By eleven o’clock the place was humming. By twelve o’clock it had some data. Sinclair called in on the speaker to hear all about it.

  Reacher said, “That day there were nearly two hundred thousand American citizens in Germany. About sixty thousand actively deployed military, plus nearly double that in families and recent retirees not gone home yet, plus about a thousand civilians on vacation, plus about five thousand more at trade conventions and board meetings.”

  “That’s a lot of Americans.”

  Reacher said, “We should go to Hamburg.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Why now?”

  “We’ll have to go sometime. We can’t solve this on paper.”

  Sinclair said, “Agent Waterman, what do you think?”

  Waterman said, “What I think depends on how fast these messengers get back and forth. Sounds like a slow process. When will our guy expect an answer? What would be a typical interval?”

  “Elsewhere it seems to be about two weeks. Maybe a day or so less.”

  “We want to be nearby when the deal is done. No question about that. But we seem to have time. I would go to Hamburg next week. I would want more background analysis first. It might save some effort in the long run.”

  “Mr. White?”

  White said, “I would assume I’m not going to Hamburg at all. Who would need me there, alongside the manhunter and the assassin? Solving things on paper is what I’m all about. I leave the East Coast only when strictly necessary.”

  Sinclair said, “Major Reacher, on what grounds do you want to go to Hamburg now?”

  Reacher said, “On the grounds that Mr. Ratcliffe said we’d get anything we want.”

  Sinclair said, “Would either Agent Waterman or Mr. White object if Major Reacher went to Hamburg on his own?”

  White said, “No.”

  Waterman said, “As long as he goes on a do-no-harm basis.”

  —

  One advantage of communicating through the West Wing was instantaneous success with airlines and hotels. Within thirty minutes Reacher and Neagley were booked non-stop that night on Lufthansa, and rooms were reserved for them at a Hamburg business hotel not far from the apartment in question, in the fashionable neighborhood Sinclair had described, reasonably central, pretty expensive.

  They stayed in McLean the rest of the afternoon and worked on eliminating personnel by matching maneuver reports to names. A guy couldn’t be driving a tank on the eastern plains and walking around Hamburg at the same time. The number of possibles dropped like a stone. Which felt like progress. Then the first reports from the airlines about Zurich started to come in. White’s guy Vanderbilt seemed to get the point, and he volunteered to work late on the cross-check while they flew, and then to call them when they landed with anything of significance.

  Cooperation school, Reacher thought. Who knew?

  —

  Neagley drove them to the airport in Reacher’s Caprice and parked in the short-term garage on the government’s dime. Her version of civilian dress was mirrored sunglasses and a battered leather jacket over a T-shirt, with pants Reacher took to be old Marine Corps leftovers like his own, but which turned out to be a genuine Ralph Lauren item. She had a bag, and he didn’t. Their seats were in coach, but were luxury items compared to the canvas slings on a military transport. They ate the food, reclined an inch, and went to sleep.

  —

  Twenty-four hours after the American left, the hooker’s apartment was much less fragrant than it had been before. Or more fragrant, to be accurate, but with the wrong scent. It was becoming noticeable, out in the corridor, and through the kitchen vents. Her neighbors, already resentful, called the cops in the middle of the night. The dispatcher sent a squad car for a look. Or a sniff, as it turned out. Which resulted in the super being roused, with a pass key. Which led to four hours of detectives, and questions, and caution tape, and crime scene technicians, and then finally an ambulance and a rubber body bag.

  Good news and bad news, from the police point of view. Hamburg was a rowdy port city, with a world-famous red light district, and drugs and graffiti at the train station, but even so homicide was relatively rare. Less than one a week. A dead body was still an event. Careers could be built. And the police department claimed a success rate close to ninety percent. That was the good news. The bad news was the remaining unsolved ten percent was all either stabbed junkies or strangled prostitutes. Occupational h
azards. Not likely to be one for the textbooks. The perpetrator was probably at sea already, in a bunk on a ship, a hundred miles away, heading for the open ocean.

  —

  Reacher and Neagley had West Wing cash in their pockets, for operational purposes, so they took a Mercedes taxi into town from the airport, through watery sunshine and morning traffic. The street with their hotel was quiet and leafy, full of buildings made of glass and pale foreign brick, and lined both sides with small but expensive cars. Their rooms were on the fourth floor, modestly elevated, with rooftop views. Hamburg was an ancient Hanseatic city, with more than a thousand years of history behind it, but none of the roofs Reacher could see was more than fifty years old. Germany had bombed Britain, and Britain had bombed back, and had gotten pretty good at it. In 1943 they had started a firestorm that all but wiped Hamburg out. Flames a thousand feet high, temperatures of a thousand degrees, the air on fire, the roads on fire, rivers and canals boiling. Forty thousand dead in one raid. Britain had lost sixty thousand in the whole war. They that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind. Hosea, one of the twelve minor prophets, but dead on the money in that case.

  The room phone rang. Neagley, arranging to meet for breakfast. Then it rang again. Vanderbilt, up late in McLean, Virginia, with the names of thirty-six Americans who had traveled from Hamburg to Zurich during the week in question. We’re going to catch all kinds of people, Reacher had said.

  He went downstairs to the breakfast buffet, which was very European, with cured meats and smoked cheeses and exotic pastries. He sat with Neagley, at a table in a window. Nine o’clock in the morning, in Hamburg, Germany.

  —

  Nine o’clock in the morning in Hamburg, Germany, was half past twelve in the afternoon in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Lunch was being prepared in the kitchen of a white mud house. Outside was a hot desert climate, like Arizona. The messenger was waiting. He had arrived during the night, after four commercial airplanes and three hundred rough miles in a Toyota pick-up truck. He was given breakfast and shown to an antechamber. He had waited there before, many times. Back and forth, back and forth. Such was his life. He was the only man in the house without a beard or an AK47.

  Eventually he was led to a small hot room. The air was full of flies, moving slowly. Two men sat on pillows, both bearded, one short and fat, the other tall and lean. Both were in plain white robes and plain white turbans.

  The messenger said, “The American wants a hundred million dollars.”

  The men in robes nodded. The tall one said, “We will discuss it tonight over dinner. Come back first thing in the morning, for our answer.”

  —

  Neagley had taken a Hamburg street plan from the concierge station. She opened it and tilted it to catch the light from the window. She said, “A fifty-minute absence suggests about a one-mile radius, don’t you think? Twenty minutes there, ten minutes talking, twenty minutes back. What kind of place would they use?”

  Reacher said, “A bar or a coffee shop or a park bench.”

  They found the rented apartment on the street plan. Neagley spanned her finger and thumb and traced a one-mile radius. The resulting circle covered a nest of streets that Reacher figured would be mostly residential but a little bit commercial, too. He had been in a lot of cities, and he knew how they worked. In that part of the world, in that part of town, there would be low-rise apartments from the second floor up, with discreet stores and offices at street level. Delis, obviously, in a small way, and maybe jewelers and dry cleaners and insurance bureaus. And bakeries and pastry shops and coffee shops, and restaurants, and bars. A neighborhood. Plus there were four pocket-handkerchief parks, which meant maybe eight benches available, and probably pigeons to feed, which was what spies did in the movies he saw.

  Neagley said, “It’s a nice day for a walk.”

  —

  A one-mile radius meant a three-mile area, which was more than two thousand acres. They found the apartment building at its center, and walked past without looking, and then stood on random corners with their map, like tourists. Of which there were others. They didn’t stand out.

  From the get-go they racked up one possibility after another, including in the first five streets alone a boutique bakery with two gold tables, and three regular coffee shops, and two bars. Reacher said, “But the meeting was in the late afternoon. Which means the bakeries aren’t right. Bakeries are morning places. I think they met in a bar.”

  “Or a park.”

  “Where would the American feel dominant? This is a negotiation, we assume. He’d want a psychological advantage. He would want to be comfortable, and he would want the other guy to be uncomfortable.”

  “Are we assuming he’s white?”

  “The odds say he is.”

  “Then a skinhead bar.”

  “Is there one in a neighborhood like this?”

  “They don’t put a sign out front. It’s an attitude.”

  Reacher looked at the map, for the right kind of shapes, for wide streets meeting, where traffic would be worse, and rents would be lower, and there would be side streets for parking. He found a possible location. They could take in two parks along the way.

  He said, “It’s a nice day for a walk.”

  —

  The parks were a disappointment in a horticultural sense. They were mostly paved over, with planters, and flowers as bright as lipstick. But they had benches, two each, and a certain kind of seclusion. One guy could have sat on one bench, and the other guy on the other, and the first guy could have spoken, and then gotten up to leave, and no one would have been wiser. Just a guy on a bench. Then another. One arrives, and one leaves.

  The parks were possibilities.

  The high-traffic area was not night and day different, but there was a little more hustle and noise. The commercial spaces spilled off the main drag into the side streets, a couple of units back. One of them was a bar with four guys outside, drinking beer. Ten o’clock in the morning. All four guys had shaved heads. All hacked and scabby, like they did it themselves with knives, and were proud of it. They were young, maybe eighteen or twenty, but large. Like four sides of beef. Not from the neighborhood, Reacher thought. Which raised issues of turf. Were they claiming something?

  Neagley said, “Let’s get a cup of coffee.”

  “Here?”

  “Those boys have something to say to us.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Just a feeling. They’re looking at us.”

  Reacher turned, and they looked at him. Tribal, with a hint of challenge, and a hint of fear. And animal, as if they were suddenly quivering with fight-or-flight secretions. As if the rubber was about to meet the road.

  He said, “What’s their problem?”

  Neagley said, “Let’s find out.”

  So he stepped ahead, on a direct line to the door.

  The four boys closed ranks.

  The boy at the front said, “Are you American?”

  Reacher said, “How could you tell?”

  The boy said, “We don’t allow Americans in this bar.”

  Chapter 6

  Afterward Reacher conceded that if a guy his own age had said it, he would have hit him right away, bang, before the last word had even died away to silence, because why let a guy who wants to start a fight do so on his own schedule? But this was a kid, and compassion demanded at least one do-over. So instead Reacher asked, very slowly, “Do you speak English?”

  The boy said, “I am speaking English.”

  “Because you got your words wrong back there. It came out all mixed up. It sounded like you think there are bars in Germany where Americans can’t walk right in and feel at home. That can’t be what you meant to say. I could teach you the right words, if you like.”

  “Germany is for Germans.”

  “Works for me,” Reacher said. “But here I am, nonetheless. Just passing through. Looking for a cup of coffee. Trying to give you an opportunity to back off and save face and n
ot get your ass kicked.”

  “There are four of us.”

  “How long did it take you to count that high? No, seriously, I’m curious.”

  There was a face at the window of the bar. Staring out, then ducking away.

  Neagley said, “We can go now. This ain’t the one. Our guy couldn’t get in.”

  Reacher said, “What about our cup of coffee?”

  “Probably lousy.”

  The boy said, “It’s not lousy. It’s good coffee here.”

  Reacher said, “You just made my mind up for me. Now step aside.”

  The boy didn’t.

  Instead he said, “Here we say what happens. Not you. The American occupation is over. Germany is for Germans.”

  “You sound like you’re fixing to fight me over it.”

  The kid took a step forward.